Farewell to the middle classes

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The
so-called ‘American Dream’ – that if individuals just work hard enough, somehow
they’ll rise out of the immiserated masses (usually at their expense) and join
the ranks of the many ‘middle class’ careerists with aspirations of
homeownership, stock options, and capital gains – has been one of the most
pervasive and persuasive myths of the twentieth century. This unwavering faith
in ‘bootstrapping’
often leads to a sort of perverse entrepreneurialism. At it’s worst it looks
like a try-hard pseudo-aristocratic libertarian sociopathy justified by a leaps
of logic that would astound even Nietzsche. At it’s best, it’s a smarmy
hagiography written by David Cameron about the entrepreneurs of ‘silicon
roundabout’. As many of us are well aware, this new-age fidelity to
self-reliance became quite fashionable in the UK circa 1980-Thatcher, and
thanks to New ‘Labour’, the neoliberalisation of the state, economy, and
society (sorry Maggie but yes it does exist) has continued right through to the
present privatisation of the NHS.

After forty-odd
years of market-liberalising fanfare, hostile shareholder takeovers,
automation, and the orgy of globalisation, we face an increasingly polarised
society. The UK now has one of the highest rates of inequality and lowest rates
of class mobility in the developed world - and it’s only going to get worse.[1]
Between 1960 and 2005, UK income inequality increased by a massive 32%.[2]
And according to the Gini
coefficient the UK saw a steady rise in inequality from a low of around 0.26 in 1977 to 0.36 in 2006-7.[3]
Comparatively the United States, though
historically more unequal, actually experienced a smaller increase in
inequality at roughly 23% during the same period. Class polarisation is a
global phenomenon, but the UK is finally at the vanguard once again. This
numerical gap has widened over the past 30 years largely due to the top 1% of
wage incomes. However, most national statistics offices decline to publish
incomes above the 90th percentile, presumably as to avoid inciting
‘populism’, envy, riots, revolution and so on.[4]
This underrepresentation of the top incomes, along with a consistent admission
by economists of the difficulty of measuring the lowest ‘lumpen’ portions of
the population, obviously causes problems for measurements of inequality, which
can be underestimated by as much as 10 percentage points.[5]

One
result of this rising inequality has been the polarisation of jobs into highly
paid, professional positions (complete with Saatchi-esq aesthetic sensibilities
for Brit art) and poorly paid shit jobs - from
coffee shops to call centres.[6]
The former group tend to compound the bloated housing market, as they need
somewhere concrete to stash their liquidity, while the latter are a mash-up of
those who started from the bottom and are still here, along with downwardly-mobile
‘graduates without a future’ Paul Mason and others talk about. These
newly proletarianised have been sold the meritocratic dream (which Michael
Young will agree, is as much a myth as the
American Dream but lost out, since it hasn’t ever actually existed save for perhaps
the ‘trente glorieuses’
of the mid-twentieth century. Despite what David
Graeber thinks, the mid-level jobs typical of that period no
longer exist. Polarisation and proletarianisation has also been catalysed
through the financial crisis. Real-terms wage growth was negative across the
board from 2008-2011 and continues to stagnate or fall due to the ‘inflation
premium’ i.e. the fact that food, fuel and transport costs have risen much
faster than inflation and inflation has risen faster than wages.[7]

Proletarianisation
has accompanied nearly every restructuring of capitalist accumulation following
a crisis, as capital must reassert it’s control over labour and grow through
expanded reproduction. In Marxian terms, proletarianisation essentially describes
the deepening of the fundamental antagonism between capitalists and workers. The
former, who control the accumulation process, decide how the means to
accumulate are used, and manage the labour that goes into it, rise even higher
in the economic hierarchy. The latter, who are largely excluded from control
over their own labour, the means of production, and accumulation, are pushed
farther down. Sometimes they are forced out of work altogether, joining the
so-called ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ or perhaps are exorcised entirely
into the surplus population. When the middle drops to the bottom, the bottom
drops out.

Historically,
the US and the UK have not experienced these levels of income inequality since
the early twentieth century. We might witness the return of something like the
‘Belle Époque’, though in the sense of the
creation of a large underclass and a wealth of cheap labour rather than Bobos in Paradise. Many of the most intense class struggles in the late 19th
century were waged by craft labourers and petit-bourgiouse resisting downward
mobility and proletarianisation.[8]
However, in the contemporary, post-whatever world, there seems to be either a
confusion or an aversion to talking about what class really means, despite the
obvious class polarisation happening before our rolling eyes. Most people’s
conception of the ‘working class’ relies on some stereotype of a white male
manual worker involved in the production of physical commodities for a private
firm. This is mainly a nostalgic crypto-fascist fantasy of the right, or
failure to understand the historical roles that gender, race, and colonialism have
played in global capitalism by the left. Classes are neither mere positions in
some abstract social structure, nor static cultural identities that one can
inhabit. Rather, they are ever-changing relations that can transform social
structures. They are in a perpetual process of organisation, dissolution, and
reformation in relation to one another. The BBC’s ‘Great
British Class Survey’ attempted to address this
with a sociological taxonomy in 2013.[9]
However, it obscured the profound class disparity that has developed over the
past 30 years with hierarchies of taste. It largely ignored analysis of the
ownership and control over capital accumulation while further contributing to
the ‘demonization of the working class’ by reproducing archaic notions of
‘highbrow’ hegemony.

Unlike during the late 19th and early 20th century, the
capitalism of today is more totalising and pervasive. As a social relation,
it is beyond dominant – it is absolute. There is a hell of a lot up for sale -from
health care to political activism, if you
can dream it, you can probably monetise it. And why not? Both left and right
political ideologies are awry parodies, simulacra of truths that weren’t even
that true to begin with, and colonised by moralists singing malevolent arias.
Capital and capitalists have never given a shit about workers or morals. Maybe
it’s time to jettison the boomer delusions of self-making and focus on who and
what is really the cause of our misery. It’s not us - it’s them; and it’s not
even really them, but the whole system as such. Kiss the bourgeois dreams of
upward mobility goodbye because it has been widely documented that increased
income inequality correlates with a marked decrease in social mobility.[10]
Class polarisation is here to stay and it will continue to make life harder for
the vast majority of people, particularly for the younger generations. So since
we are going to be stuck down here for a while, we might as well get organised
and fight for the spoils of our labour, right? Recent waves of strikes from the
3 Cosas
campaign to the Ritzy
cinema workers’ fight for a living wage show
that self-organisation works and direct action ‘gets the goods’. As Tomas
Piketty, author of one of the largest historical macroeconomic studies to date, remarked in a recent interview “The reduction of inequality
during the 20th century was largely the product of violent political upheavals,
and not so much of peaceful electoral democracy.”[11]
Perhaps both workers and capitalists
should take note.